Rewarding the best answers of 2016

Question

Latin SE has come a long way since we started nearly a year ago. We've seen lots of great questions and answers, and now, your moderators would like your input in determining what were the best answers of 2016. Here's how it will work:

• In a new answer to this question, nominate what you think was one of the best answers posted in 2016. Include a link to it and a few words explaining why you think it's great.
• The community will vote up and down on the various nominations.
• After three weeks (March 10, about 20:00 UTC), the three nominations with the highest scores on this meta post will be declared the winners.
• The three winning answers will be rewarded with bounties of 200, 100, and 50 reputation, from the personal reputation stashes of the moderators.

To reiterate, nominated answers must have been originally posted in 2016. You can use this search to find candidates, but remember – the number of votes that an answer has already received isn't a perfect metric of quality! There are many superb answers with a score of 6 or 8 or 10 that weren't created on the first few days of our private beta, or that didn't make it onto the Hot Network Questions list, and thus didn't get as much attention (and votes) as others. So this might be an opportunity for some of those excellent overlooked answers to get the attention they deserve.

For this contest to succeed we need your nominations and votes! We are planning to continue rewarding the best answers on a quarterly basis, and the level of community participation in this contest will directly impact whether we carry out the plan.

Remember, the deadline for both nominations and votes is March 10 at 20:00 UTC. Post your nominations early to ensure that they get the most visibility possible!

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The votes have been counted and the winners of our first contest are:

1. Why hippopotamus instead of potamohippus? by brianpck
2. How do you write dates in Latin? by Joonas Ilmavirta
3. Why do ablatives of the 3rd declension sometimes end on -e, at other times on -i? by TKR

Answer 1

In November brianpck explained in why hippopotamus is not "potamippus" or "potamohippus". I like how the answer can be interesting to people with no prior understanding of Latin or Greek.

Answer 2

I would also like to nominate Joonas Ilmavirta's answer to How do you write dates in Latin?. It's an excellent review of a very complicated topic and demonstrates what a good, culturally-aware answer to a translation question should look like.

Answer 3

I would like to nominate TKR's brief and highly informative answer on the endings of ablatives of the 3rd declension. I think everyone will agree with me that thanks to TKR it's become possible for us here to learn more about state-of-the-art, professional linguistics research.

Answer 4

I would like to nominate Tom Cotton's answer regarding learning new poetic meters. It contains a wealth of extremely useful information, draws on his extensive knowledge of Latin and suggests a couple of sources for further study. Let me just say this — we are so lucky to have such an expert as Tom Cotton on our website!

Answer 5

Very late to this party, but I would like to nominate this answer by Cerberus on "Why do we say that an ablative absolute has a participle?" It goes well beyond the question as asked to give a lucid and thorough discussion not only of the ablative absolute, but of other so-called "dominant constructions", which are related to it and to each other but are not often (or not often enough!) treated under the same rubric.

Answer 6

One more nomination. Penelope always writes such detailed and highly informative posts, extensively drawing on Latin texts, and this answer of hers, on a circumflex in a poem from 1621, is a good case in point. Hic manebimus optime!

Answer 7

I liked sumelic's answer to How do we know the quantity of vowels followed by several consonants?, posted in October. He does a nice job of breaking down the types of evidence, describing how far the evidence can take us, and providing sources.

Answer 8

I think a second nomination for sumelic is in order for his answer to What effect should a macron have on the sound of a letter and its word? last February. His answer is diligently researched, clearly explained, and carefully balanced.